I remembered a taxi driver I’d been having a few drinks with, back in England. He’d told me, if his fare talked politics, then he’d agree with them. Whatever they said. “I been Labour, Tory, UKIP, RCP, you name it. I been all o’them—for twenty minutes.” His point was simple. If they liked you, then you got a tip. Mission accomplished.
Well, I wanted a tip, too. I wanted this little bit of god-stuff that she had in her apartment, and I wanted some clear notion how she’d come by it. That was my job. That’s why I’d been pushing her around the city for the last few days. So it wouldn’t have been too much effort to agree, or at the very least, to nod, and murmur sympathetically.
I said, “Bullshit.”
She looked at me, and raised her brows.
I said, “You cannot prove a word of that, and for a very good reason. Because none of it’s true.”
“Ha. Colored boy gets shot, half the country’s up in arms, President’s on TV, and you know what? Boy’s a thug, a criminal. How many times we seen that now? How many times?”
“Still bullshit.”
She laughed, a cackle like a pair of crows fighting. “Oh, you people! You are so, so easy to offend!”
“What ‘people’?”
But she was laughing too hard to reply.
The Statue still hung over us. But the Statue, like all well-practiced politicians, gazed off into the distance, and took no interest at all in any little quarrels going on beneath her feet.
He had proposed to her there. Liberty Island.
She told me this only as we docked at Battery Park. Yet it all made sense. The modern city, she took not the slightest interest in, only the parts of it that harked back to her younger days, and to her life with Frugs.
So when she had me make a detour on the way home, and stopped off at a corner in the west 80s, opposite a sports store, I assumed there was a reason for it.
“That,” she told me, “used to be a restaurant. Twenty, thirty years ago.”
I looked at the jerseys and the running shoes, the tennis racquets and the sale signs, imagining the windows packed with diners—somewhere chic, upmarket, yet still neighborhood, I thought . . .
“Frugs closed it down.”
“He . . . ?”
“Buglioni’s, it was called. Buglioso’s. Something like that. Claimed it was a West Side institution. You know the way they do. Well,” she took a deep breath, gearing for a race. “To get to the restroom there, you had to pass the door to the kitchen, and he saw—he actually saw this fellow drop a steak onto the floor. Drop it, pick it up, and serve it.”
“Happens a lot, I bet. Don’t often see it, though.”
“Ah. Ah.” She wagged a finger at me. “You don’t understand. You see—I was the one who’d ordered steak. It was my steak.”
“I see.”
“And Frugs—he was livid. Took it very personally, that way. He had friends in City Hall, you know.”
It was a nice tale. I didn’t like the restaurant folk, and I didn’t like Frugs, either, yet there was something in the telling of it—as if the tenderness, the softness at its heart could only be approached through these harsh, boastful details.
She was not telling a story of revenge. Rather of the love this man had borne her, and the way that he’d defended her, as if he were a knight in some romantic tale.
I said, “You must have loved him very much.”
“He was infuriating. But yes. We were together forty-seven years. He never played around. Not once. I would have known.”
I thought about that: being with the same person for almost half a century. Angel still surprised me with the things she did, the facets of her character I’d never seen before. But ten years, thirty years, forty years on? What would that be like? The same person, breathing next to you each night, waking with you every morning? Saying the same things, doing the same things? Knowing you like no one else has ever done, or ever would?
And then to have it all taken away?
How did you get over that?
“Come on,” she said. “Enough.” And then, “I’ll show you his picture, if you like.”
“Yeah, I’d like.”
“And that other thing you want to see,” she said. “Perhaps we can do something about that, too.”
Chapter 7
The Apartment
The doorman held the door for us. He called the elevator down. He wished us both a happy evening, ran his hand over his shaven pate and smiled, blessing our unlikely union.
Music tinkled in the elevator.
“Home sweet home,” she said, without the slightest joy.
Her place was dark and cluttered. Nothing in it could have been less than twenty years old. There was a flowery, old-fashioned scent, mingling with the mildew and the dust. She pottered around a moment, then surprised me by producing whiskey, pouring me a glass of it, and another for herself, to which she added soda. She was the only American with whom I have ever drunk who didn’t fill the glass with ice. I wondered if she even had a freezer.